December now is here, carrying with it so many red letter days. There are the ones we all know, of course, but there are many lesser ones, like Santa Lucia’s Day on the 13th and St. Nicholas’ Eve on the 5th, not to mention the Twelve Days of Christmas that come on the heels of Christmas Day itself. Half of them are in the old year, half in the new, and this alone can be counted as one of the beautiful mysteries of the season, which stands outside of ordinary time. It is a month of gift bearers and light bearers in a time of wintry darkness.
And so it is a complex month, December. To help make it as meaningful as possible, here is your December Book of Days calendar. It is a printable PDF document, designed for standard US letter size paper. Print it and follow along as the Book of Days blog chapters are published.
The cover star this month is a snowy field, the front yard at my Aunt Anne’s house in Palos Park, Illinois, where Seth and I and the rest of my family gathered to spend Thanksgiving. The increasing darkness on the approach to Midwinter is much more noticeable in a northern place, and we had many snowy days there, as well. The scene above is what we awoke to on our first morning there. The snow was falling still late that same afternoon, and if you look closely (perhaps not even very closely) you can see the snowflakes that landed on my camera lens. The magic of a snowy field becomes quite apparent when you’re standing in its midst.